T42p: speed up with second HD?

[sjh953]

I've got a T42p (2373-Q1U) which has recently started working slowly. I've got the Hitachi 7200 100gb drive, WinXP Pro SP2. Supposedly, it's got about 30gb space remaining. 2gb memory.

I say 'supposedly' because over the course of a day of use (mostly Firefox 2) I can watch the available disk space drop, sometimes down to zero remaining space. When I restart, I've got the 30gb back. (Right now, it's at 3.26gb, so I'll be restarting after I post this.)

At the moment, I've disabled the page file. What I'm wondering is if it would help to move the paging file to a second hard drive in the battery bay? I've got the original 60gb/7200 drive that came with the machine; I've got the tray to mount it in. I just don't want to erase that drive unless I have to, tho I do have the IBM install CD's. Right now, I use the bay for a slim battery, but would be willing to sacrifice that if it would speed things up.

I'm also thinking I could move the Firefox cache location to the second drive, for the same reasons.

What I'm hoping is that by taking some of the pressure off the main drive, I would boost performance. Is this a reasonable approach?

Some other specs from Task Manager, as I write this: PF Usage - 1.01 GB. CPU Usage - between 12 and 32%. Physical Memory - 785988 available. Kernel Memory - total/120816, Paged/61476, Nonpaged/59344.

Thanks for the help.

[aaa]

Erm... the pagefile shouldn't be eating 30gb. Try setting it to 3gb or something. Of course it would be better to find out out why the automatic setting makes it get so big, but I'm not sure what to do about that.

[sjh953]

Thanks for your rely. I'm not really sure whether the page file is the issue or not. I've been getting massive amounts of disk activity; for example, if I click on a link to a site I've never visited before, it might take 20 or 30 seconds before I get the cursor back and the disk activity light goes off. This seems to happen especially with sites using Flash, Javascript, etc. (I'm not enough of a geek to really know what's going on. With Firefox, I installed some plug-ins that disable Flash, etc., but I still get the disk activity.)

After my original post, I did install the 60gb drive in the battery bay, and then moved my Firefox cache to that drive. Haven't used the machine enough today to notice if it's making any real difference.

I had tried to move the page file to the 60gb drive previously, but abandoned that idea when the message came up telling me that a page file already existed on that drive, and asking if I wanted to replace it. I figured that would be fatal to the installed system, so I didn't do it.

I guess I'm just at a loss for what could be causing all that disk activity and/or taking up all that disk space.

Could it be with firewall/router settings or something similar, where the site at the other end of the link is having trouble completing the operation? I don't have problems if I'm working in Word, Photoshop, or other programs. For the record, I'm using a DLink DI-524 router, and I'm on Comcast.

Thanks again.

[Johan]

I have a 2373-Q1U almost identical to yours ("only" using a 60 GB/7200 rpm Hitachi HDD), and I am having no problems like what you describe. I am using Win XP Pro (SP2 - haven't installed SP3), and surfing using FireFox ver. 2.0.0.20.

A few suggestions: Check what programs are auto-started; use the free and highly recommended tool AutoRuns for Windows. Clean up in the list - you may have unnecessary programs running. Then, also get Process Explorer and see what is actually running? You can enable columns showing e.g. I/O activity and I/O bytes written by this or that program (right-click at the menu-line and choose "Select Columns"). Next, get a HDD monitor/usage program; either one of those mentioned in the Sysinternals File and Disk Utilities or something like WinDirStat. Also, clean up your HDD using e.g. CCleaner. If you haven't done it already, run a thorough virus-scan, suing either the free tool AVG Free or one of the online tools, such as Trend Micro housecall. Also, consider getting SpyBot. These are the things I would check first...

Johan

[sjh953]

Thanks, Johan, for the help. (The 2373-Q1U is a pretty nice machine, isn't it?)

Concerning my internet speed problem, I think it has more to do with my wireless router/ISP than it does the computer itself. I'm still investigating, but I may get a new router; the DLink DI-524 is getting quite old, is unsupported now by DLink, and had mediocre reviews even when it was new. It could just be time to update. The LINKSYS WRT54GL seems to get good reviews, so I may give that one a try. It's only money.